3 Answers
3

You shouldn't have 200 fonts loaded all at the same time. They can bog down the system and the applications that use the font folders for menus, in addition to the problems you stated in trying to navigate the ever-growing menu.

You really need a separate font management tool of some kind to help you organize your fonts into sets of your liking. There are a number of them out there; Extensis Suitcase Fusion and FontXplorer Pro come to mind.

From the FontXplorer website...

Is font management for you? Font
management is for anyone who uses more
than just a handful of fonts.

Ask yourself these questions:

Do you need to free up your system?
Every font that has been activated on
your system requires the deployment of
system resources to applications. This
can be an unproductive use of
resources, particularly for fonts that
are used infrequently. Font management
allows you to activate fonts solely
for the period of time you actually
need them, freeing up precious
resources so your system can run more
efficiently.

Do you have trouble maintaining an
overview of your fonts? Every
professional creative application you
install adds new fonts to your system
that you may or may not want. Font
management helps you find, preview,
and sort fonts and deactivate the ones
you don’t need.

Do 200 fonts really slow down a machine these days?
–
e100Jul 7 '11 at 16:33

@e100: Good point, but based on my experience there is more to it than just a general slow down of the computer as a whole. Too many fonts can get in the way of other processes. I have scripts that rely on specific fonts, and searching through more than a handful slows things down. Certain applications don't take too well to having too many items in the font menu. Either way, potentially slowing down the machine is ancillary to the actual problem of just navigating and using so many fonts at once.
–
Philip ReganJul 7 '11 at 17:35

I know this question (and answer) is old but it's relevant to me. I didn't even think about the fonts affecting programs using them and I thank you for that. I have 15,000+ fonts installed and my system is much slower.
–
SpedwardsOct 14 '14 at 9:05

Well, if you've only 200 or so fonts, you're doing pretty well. Most designers I know have about 10 times that number, although most, like me, only use a small handful on a regular basis and keep the others for occasional use in display work.

There's nothing in Photoshop currently that allows you to build a "favorite fonts" list. When Photoshop opens, it asks the OS for the fonts it has to work with, then looks in an additional Adobe-specific font directory if that's present. So the problem is at the OS level, really.

I would suggest you get TypeDNA, which I helped beta test a while back. It is a unique and quite brilliant font manager that has great tools to help you pick fonts for a particular project or find fonts that harmonize with one another (for headlines vs. body copy, for example). And it's very inexpensive. While you're at the TypeDNA website be sure to check out the FontShaker page. This is an entirely unique (and fun) look at your fonts.

Of course, he takes an extreme stance and it's rarely one that makes sense literally. But designers do tend to form a toolbox of work-horse faces that they use 80% of the time. You could even probably consider it an example of the 80/20 rule-of-thumb. 80% of your typeface needs can be handled by 20% of your collection.

So I agree with the others. You probably don't want 200 fonts in your font menu. It's just clutter. Keep your 20-30 workhorse faces and then put all the rest into a font management tool with a categorization system that makes sense to you.